The explosion of mobile banking! My upcoming Texas keynote ….

I’m off to Austin, Texas today, where I’ll be the closing keynote speaker tomorrow for the annual meeting of the Texas Credit Union League.

My role is to motivate and challenge the audience to continue to focus on applying innovative and creative ideas to their businesses, given that there is constant change within the financial sector. Not just due to the financial crisis, but also due to rapidly shifting consumer behavior, the rapid emergence of new technologies, and the extremely fast development of new business models.

Particularly with the idea of mobile banking!

Take the story of Wizzit (which boasts the slogan, “With Wizzit, you have your bank in your pocket“), based in South Africa. 200,000 South African’s have signed up for the service, in which they pay bills, store cash like a debit card, transfer funds, and send remittances. Wizzit is completely text messaging based.
Accounts can be opened in 30 seconds via a call center, and are sold via Wizzkids (It’s based upon the JetBlue model – with these representatives working at home). Plans are to expand the business model into Eastern Europe, according to Bank Technology News.

Then there is the story of Guaranty Bank in Turkey, which boasts $61 billion in assets. They set up a mobile banking portal — and in the first two months, saw 1 million page views, 50,000 customers, 30,000 transactions and $24 million in transaction volume.

Today, they’ve got 1.3 million mobile banking customers, and believe that the service is accessible on 5,100 cellphone models.

Quite clearly, mobile is going to play a huge role in financial services, and it’s happening NOW!

On stage, I’ll be challenging this group to realize that their future success will come from their ability to respond to rapidly changing products, markets, business models, rapid economic trends, and competitive. In that way, innovation isn’t just about new products — it’s about responding to the reality that in every industry, faster is the new fast.

• Wizzit Web site
• Innovation in the financial sector – related post